We hear this a lot:
“We run hundreds of service accounts and AI agents in the background. We didn’t create most of them. We don’t know who owns them. How are you supposed to secure them?”
All businesses today run more than users. Behind the scenes there are thousands of nonhuman identities that move from service accounts to API tokens, AI agents, access systems, data, and perform tasks around the clock.
They are not new. But they are growing at high speed. And most weren’t built with security in mind.
Traditional identity tools assume intent, context, and ownership. Non-human identity does not have any of them. They don’t log in and out. They don’t get offboard. And with the rise of autonomous agents, they are often beginning to make their own decisions with broad permissions and little oversight.
You’ve already created a new blind spot. But we are only the first one.
This post explains how most organizations are still publicly available non-human identity risks are evolving, and how the identity security fabric helps security teams stay ahead of scale before scale becomes unmanageable.
Rising (and risk) in nonhuman identity
Cloud-first architecture has increased infrastructure complexity and caused a surge in background identity. As these environments grow, the number of background identities increases with them, many of which are automatically created without clear ownership or oversight. In many cases, these identities outweigh human users by numbers from 80 to 1.
What puts that in particular at risk is how little most teams know about them. NHIs are often automatically created during deployment or provisioning, then disappear from the radar, not tracked, not owned, and often over-permitted.
Service accounts in particular are everywhere. Move data between systems, run scheduled jobs, and authenticate headless services. However, their sprawls are rarely visible and their permission is rarely reviewed. Over time, they become the perfect vehicle for lateral movement and escalation of privilege.
However, the service account is only a part of the photo. As AI adoption grows, new categories of nonhuman identity pose even more unpredictable risks.
Why AI agents behave differently and why they are important
Unlike most machine IDs, the AI agent starts the action itself. Autonomously interact with APIs, query data, and make decisions.
That autonomy is costly. AI agents often require access to sensitive data and APIs, but few organizations have Guardrails on what they can and how to revoke that access.
Worse, most AI agents lack clear ownership, do not follow the standard lifecycle and have little visibility into real-world behavior. They can be deployed by developers, embedded in tools, or invoked via external APIs. Once live, they can run indefinitely, often accompanied by permanent credentials and increased privileges.
Additionally, it is difficult for AI agents to monitor using traditional IDINCELLs such as IP, location, device context, etc., because they are not tied to users or sessions.
Invisible access costs
The secret is hardcoded. The token will be reused. Orphan identity remains active for months, sometimes for years.
These risks are not new, but if you have dozens of service accounts, static credentials and extensive access may be manageable. However, with thousands or even tens of thousands of NHIs operating independently across cloud services, manual tracking simply doesn’t expand.
That’s why many security teams are reexamining how to define identity in the first place. Because if an AI agent can authenticate, access data and make decisions, it’s because it’s an identity. And if that identity is not governed, it is a responsibility.
Common NHI Security Challenges
Understanding that nonhuman identity represents an increased risk is one thing. Managing that risk is another thing. The central problem is that tools and processes built for human identity management are not converted into the world of APIs, service accounts, and AI agents. This disconnect creates some clear and dangerous security challenges that many organizations are just beginning to face.
You cannot protect what you cannot see
The most fundamental challenge in ensuring NHIS is visibility. Most security teams don’t have a complete inventory of all non-human identities that operate in their environment. These identities are often dynamically created by developers or automated systems to provide specific temporary functionality. They spin up to support new microservices, run deployment scripts, and integrate third-party applications.
However, once created, it is rarely documented or tracked by a central identity management system. They become “shadow” identities that are active and functional, but are completely invisible to security and it. Without a comprehensive view of what NHIS exists, who (or what) was created, and what they are accessing, it is impossible to build meaningful security strategies. They are trying to secure an attack surface of unknown size.
Why is “setting and forgetting” a security responsibility?
A common practice for developers and operations teams is to assign broad permissions to NHIS to ensure that the service or application functions without interruption. Think of installing an app that requires access to the camera roll, microphone, or location. Simply tap “Allow” to make it work and forget about it.
It’s faster and more convenient at the moment, but poses unnecessary risks. Similarly, while excessively widespread permissions can make setup easier, it creates critical security gaps and makes the system vulnerable to exploitation.
The principle of least privilege is often sacrificed for speed and convenience. NHI may need to read data from one database table, but write access to the entire database is granted to avoid future permission-related errors.
This approach creates large security responsibility. These excessively permitted identities become valuable targets for attackers. If threat actors compromise NHI with excessive privileges, they can move the system sideways, escalate access and remove sensitive data without the need for human user credentials.
As how NHI is rarely reviewed or excluded, these tolerant accounts remain active and vulnerable for months or years, waiting to be exploited.
No context, no modern controls
Modern identity security is context dependent. Once a user logs in, they can use signals such as location, device, network, and more to verify their identity. In many cases, if something seems unusual, it encourages multi-factor authentication (MFA). NHIS has none of this context. It’s just the code that runs on the server. There is no device, geographic location, or pattern of behavior that can be easily monitored.
MFA does not apply as they are authenticated with static, long-life credentials. This means that if your credentials are stolen there is no second factor to stop the attacker from using it. There is no context-aware access control, making it extremely difficult to distinguish between legal and malicious NHI activities until it’s too late.
Orphan Identity and Digital Ghost
What happens when the developer who created a service account leaves the company? Or what if an application using a specific API token is deprecated? Most organizations have the associated NHIS left behind. These “orphans” or “long-lasting” identities remain intact, but are not responsible for the lifecycle, so these identities remain active.
These digital ghosts are compliance nightmares and security risks. They clutter the environment and make it difficult to identify legitimate and positive identities. More importantly, they represent abandoned, unsupervised entry points to your system. The attacker, who discovered the orphan’s identity with valid credentials, found the perfect backdoor that no one had seen.
How security teams are regaining control
Faced with a growing attack surface, it is becoming more autonomous, with key security teams moving from reactive remediation to aggressive governance. This shift begins with recognizing all certification systems, scripts, and agents as valuable identities to manage.
Discover and stock all nhis
Modern identity platforms scan environments such as AWS, GCP, and ONPREM infrastructure to represent hidden tokens, unmanaged service accounts, and overly authorized roles.
These tools replace spreadsheets and applicable inventory with real-time, unified inventory of both human and non-human identities. Without this foundation, governance is merely a speculation. This allows security teams to move from playing the mall using their service accounts to build real controls.
Triage and tackle high risk identity first
With fully stocked, the next step is to reduce the potential blast radius. Not all NHIs pose the same level of risk. The key is to prioritize repairs based on permissions and access. Risk-based privilege management helps identify which identities are risky and over-permitted.
From there, the team can systematically make right-sized access, consistent with the principle of least privilege. This includes implementing more powerful controls, such as secrets and automatic rotation of credentials. For the most powerful NHIs, like autonomous AI agents, it is important to have a “kill switch” that allows for immediate session termination if abnormal behavior is detected.
Automate governance and lifecycle
Human identity includes lifecycle policies such as onboarding, role changes, and offboarding. Non-human identities require the same rigor.
Major organizations automate these processes end-to-end. When a new NHI is created, an owner with scope permission is assigned and added to the auditable inventory. If the tool is deprecated or the developer leaves the associated identities automatically deprovision, closing the door to the orphan account, and access will not remain indefinitely.
Why Identity Security Fabric Changes Equations
Many of the risks associated with non-human identities have nothing to do with themselves, but are related to fragmented systems that attempt to manage them.
Each cloud provider, CI/CD tool, and AI platform handles identity differently. Some use static tokens. Some may issue credentials during deployment. Some people don’t expire access at all. Without a shared system to define ownership, assign authority, and enforce guardrails, sprawls are not checked.
The unified identity security fabric changes this by integrating all human and non-human identities under a single control plane. And with Okta, that means:
Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM) automatically surfaces the gap between identity and attitude superficially, superficially, superficially, and superficially. Enforce minimal access using rotation and vault for sensitive secrets that define the lifecycle policy for all identities, including agents and service accounts, that extend the loading identity pattern. Underlying Agent/Workload Credentials
Instead of sewing a workaround, the team can define identity controls once and apply them anywhere. This means that you don’t need 10 different tools to get there, and you’ll have fewer blind spots, shorter response times, and smaller attack surfaces.
Don’t let NHIS become your biggest blind spot
AI agents and nonhuman identities have already reconstructed their attack surface. They multiply faster than most teams can track, and many still work without clear ownership, strong control, or actual visibility.
There’s no need to rebuild your strategy from scratch. However, we need to treat nonhuman identities like them. It is an important access point that deserves the same governance as the user.
A unified identity platform allows security teams to stock what they are running, apply scalable controls, and block high-risk access before exploiting them.
See how OKTA and AWS can help organizations bring order to NHI sprawl. [Download the guide] To get started.
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